7 minute read
Passing with Flying Colors
MTSU turns the Bonnaroo Music and Arts Festival into an outdoor classroom each summer
by Kailee Shores
The Bonnaroo grounds, affectionately dubbed “the Farm,” are a haze of smoke, dust, and glitter each June. Music fanatics of every genre descend on small town Manchester, Tennessee, in classic festival-wear, including but not limited to homemade mushroom hats and rainbow thongs. The thumping bass can be heard throughout the county, and lights crisscross the sky at nigh
But inside “The Truck,” MTSU’s almost $2 million mobile production lab, is an entirely different scene: cables and countdown clocks, screens and buttons, and switches galore. The screens host a live feed from the pit at concerts that the MTSU team is producing for Hulu’s livestream of the festival. BigXthaPlug’s concert on the screens and in the speakers was in direct contrast with director Ava Pardue’s sharp camera cues.
Pardue, a junior in MTSU’s Live Production program, acted as both director and technical director for BigXthaPlug’s Thursday night rap set at This Tent. That concert was one of 53 that MTSU students produced over the course of the four-day festival— responsible for all the concerts on both the This Tent and That Tent stages in 2024.
Taught by MTSU Associate Professor Robert Gordon, a 47-year veteran in the field, the students are part of MTSU’s Media Arts Department. Students are required to complete prerequisites in multi-camera I and II before they can take the Bonnaroo class. Many of the students, like Pardue, have done live production work in the past with MTSU, but Bonnaroo is its own beast.
“We try to teach them how to do a show like this by the seat of your pants,” said Gordon, interim chair of Media Arts. “This is different from everything else that we do in multi-camera because it is so unrehearsed.”
The unpredictability of live production is exactly what Pardue loves so much. She’s hooked on the adrenaline.
“I don’t really like the editing process and the slow pace of just regular filmmaking,” she said. “This gets me amped up. It’s a whole different high.”
Crash Course
Pardue’s job as director was to make viewers at home feel like their couch had teleported to the concert.
“You pay attention to the beats of the music. You want to cut when the beat drops. You want to see who’s actually doing something. It’s like you want to [feel like] a person in a concert standing there, but you just have it on your screen. [I] want to deliver that to [my] people,” she said.
That came easy during the BigXthaPlug concert because he’s one of Pardue’s favorite artists. She knew his music inside and out going into the concert.
Pardue had full creative freedom throughout the concert, cutting from camera to camera—also operated by MTSU students—to generate festival energy in living rooms across the nation.
That’s a lot of pressure on college students who, for many, have never produced such a large concert.
“[It’s] a big investment of trust on the part of Bonnaroo,” Gordon said. “They have a bunch of 18- to 21-year-old students handling 40% of their output.”
Even though the students are working on such a large commercial product and such a grand scale, they are still students, and it is student work. Gordon said when the Bonnaroo class first began, he worried about trying to “preserve the integrity” of what the students were doing because even though it is a class, the product they create is representative of the University to such a large audience.
He’s changed his tune over the last couple of years, saying he’s released his perfectionism in exchange for a full and unfettered emphasis on learning.
Some students do choke, and some students don’t,” Gordon said. “It’s not brain surgery. No lives are going to be lost in an entertainment show. And if it’s kind of wobbly, that’s fine. You still learn from it. And that’s the main point—that they learn.
The festival is a crash course for students on what working in the concert industry is really like. Days are reflective of what the students’ day-to-day lives will look like if they pursue a career in live concert production. Call times— the industry equivalent of working hours—are the likes of noon to 3 a.m. In the professional world, those hours constitute a normal workday.
“These students get a chance to see, ‘Is this the thing I want to do or what?’ ” Gordon said. “Some students love this, and that’s why they get great opportunities when they leave. . . . Other students think, ‘I’d like to have a normal life, and this was fun for the summer, but no more. . . .’ Both choices are perfect.”
Gold Standard
Despite the students’ amateur status, C3 Presents, the production company for Bonnaroo, has been routinely impressed by the quality of their work.
Daniel Gibbs, the director of broadcast and content at C3, said the concerts produced by MTSU students are as good as the ones produced by industry professionals, from the camera work and audio to the tech positions and directing.
“We really enjoyed the program and saw that not only do they have the tech and the personnel, but also a great roster of students with a lot of talent,” Gibbs said.
It’s a challenge that isn’t likely to be found anywhere else. Gordon said live production trucks at universities elsewhere are usually owned by the athletic department to produce sports rather than by an academic program for
instruction. MTSU’s truck operates under the College of Media and Entertainment, allowing Media Arts students to use it to produce broadcasts of games, concerts, and other events.
That’s what makes the arrangement between MTSU and Bonnaroo unique.
“I do these festivals all over the country, and I’ve never seen another MTSU operation,” Gibbs said. “I’ve never seen another school that has such a program. I think the access to the equipment and tech that MTSU has . . . is top-notch.
A lot of the people [I’ve worked] with over the years went to MTSU, learned at MTSU, so it does seem like it is the gold standard for live video production. There’s nothing like that in Austin where we do [Austin City Limits ]. There’s nothing like that in Chicago where we do Lollapalooza.”
The School of Journalism and Strategic Media also has a class that goes to the festival. Taught by Matt Leimkuehler, students in the Bonnaroo journalism class spend the weekend writing music reviews and features on the culture and people at the festival.
Their work is funneled to any members of the Tennessee Press Association for use, and all the articles are published by MTSU’s student-run digital news organization Sidelines.
MTSU President Sidney McPhee said students’ real-world experience at Bonnaroo represents major strategic investments by the University that will position them for jobs in music and video production.
We don’t come to Bonnaroo and just talk to students about the business,” he said. “We come to Bonnaroo every year to give our students opportunities that will get them in the business.
Whether as a member of the student production team or a member of the student press corps, the work at Bonnaroo is hard and the hours are long. Students end the weekend far more exhausted even than fans who attended the festival. But the MTSU students wearing the blue “live production” T-shirts gained so much more—a resume bullet point sure to pay off in future professional success. MTSU
Editor’s note: Kailee Shores graduated in December with a Journalism degree and served as editor of Sidelines in spring and fall 2024.
EXPERIENCE THAT COUNTS
7
years MTSU has produced live Bonnaroo concerts for TV
53
live concerts of various genres produced over 4 days in 2024 for Hulu
32
students from 2 classes (video production and audio production) filling all TV production roles
10
cameras for the This Tent and That Tent stages
0
other universities in the country that do a production like this
500+
events since mobile production truck went online in 2011 (first production at Capitol Records Street Party in Nashville)
